2016-08-22

I didn’t read the entire article because it is too rambly and
I don’t share the author’s affection for writing assembly, but
a few fragments resonate well with me, for example this one:

“At numerous times I found that conscious isolation can sometimes
indeed lead to more direct insights, techniques and solutions to
existing problems, which otherwise are not taken into account, if
all of our activity is only based on and influenced by the prior
research of others. Focus always has a cost and research takes time.
That is especially true in today’s open source culture and the
endless hourly influx of hip new projects via social media.”

“I think people, in order to work, they have to focus on the
process because the content doesn’t inspire them. […] Blinded
by the process so that they, you know, are interested in at least
something because, yeah, it’s a hard reality when the thing that
you’re working on just isn’t really good.”

“It’s completely wrong to apply the same standards of critique
to works that are made with different intents.”

“It also included several interesting phrases which stood out to
me, including Every Atom Procedural and Every Planet Unique.
On its own, this language was not a surprising angle for a game
to take in its marketing. The Binding of Isaac’s Steam page, for
example, promises ‘you never play the same game twice‘ but
no-one so much as raises an eyebrow when they sit down and
discover that they are, shockingly, playing The Binding Of Isaac
every time.”

“When we use extreme language to talk about procedural generators
(or any other kind of technology), we encourage people to draw
extreme conclusions.”

“For many other generators, you might think that explaining how
its processes work would be kind of… boring? You’d probably be
right. A lot of generators are boring, and I think that’s one of
the reasons why we reach for the big numbers and strong
statements, to cover up this fact.”

“Drawing his finger across the screen, he nudged the lever bars
to indicate attributes like body mass, aggressiveness, windpipe
length, wetness, screechiness, harshness. (The software makes
sounds based on roughly a hundred different parameters.) Then,
while moving his thumbs across two graphical boxes on the
iPad—one labelled “vowel map,” the other “pitch”—and
simultaneously twisting the device in space, he generated a
vocalization. The iPad’s physical movement determined the
energy behind the utterance: the arc of the motion shaping the
sound’s arc.”